Adobe claimed that they don't ship Flash Players with any known crashing bugs. They had a great blog post and it made at least me feel that maybe it wasn't their fault. Then the evidence is presented that they not only ship with known crashing bugs, but neglect to fix them for years.
Now comes the argument that they aren't allowed to open-source Flash because some of it is non-free. However, madars has already pointed out that Adobe has taken legal action over the RTMP protocol (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107585) and, similarly (although a tad dated) Rob Savoye of the Gnash (GNU Flash) project has said:
The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.
Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.
(http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30)
Adobe's hasn't been given a lot of hassle over Flash for a long time. We've kind of accepted that it was free as in beer, ran on Linux (if poorly), etc. Now we're seeing that Flash could become the barrier to HTML5 and we're finally re-evaluating Adobe's patronage. We've found out that we don't want to be Adobe's ward - protected, well-fed, etc. We want to be able to live and innovate for ourselves.